> You can charge any price you > like, and you're only obligated to pass on the code to those you sold > or gave the binaries to.
Well, no. Once you ship a binary to even a single person (outside your company), that person is free under the GPL license to make and share as many copies of the binary as they like. Each eventual recipient has the right to come back to you to get the source code. Each binary must come with an offer that says how to get the matching source. Your recipients are free to reproduce that offer for their recipients. So, you are obligated to provide source code that matches each binary version that you ship, to *anyone* who has the binary (not just your own customers), for three years or the support lifetime of the binary product, whichever is longer, and for a low cost. See paragraph 6(b) of http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html . There's a FAQ on the GNU Public License at that same web page. > > But answer me this: Why did we (the gnuradio experts) > > select a license that does not provide a clear answer to Matt's question? I'm one of the originators of the GNU Radio project. We picked the GPL because it protects the freedom of the code (and the code's users), and encourages a community to form around the code. By then I'd already started and sold off one company that made tons of money by selling and supporting GPL-licensed and other free software. I really didn't see any problem with making commercial gear that used GNU Radio under the GPL. There are tons of network routers and PDAs and such that ship with GNU/Linux inside -- much of which is also GPL-licensed. Those companies seem to be able to read the license, figure it out, and make money. You can make money with free software by selling your expertise; by selling convenience; by selling support; by selling quality assurance; by selling documentation; by selling hardware that works with free software (like Ettus Research does); and in other ways. You just can't make money by preventing people from seeing your code, freely sharing your code, and improving it if they want to. When we started GNU Radio, the only working software-defined radio code was proprietary. The opportunity was there to build a community-maintained SDR code base, that everyone would be free to experiment with, share, improve, or commercialize. We did it (thanks, everybody)! Eric and I could've built another proprietary SDR package, but then you wouldn't all be here having this conversation. John (PS: Most of the proprietary software I've seen has even more draconian and unreadable licenses than the free software.) _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
